Sable Lily Manifesto
All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’
- Toni Morrison
All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’
- Toni Morrison
We were built to feel love and pleasure and they hate us for it, and they'll kill us for it. But after the misery of living in their world, we can yet find each other and call our little corner of life worthwhile.
My fiction is unapologetically for traumatized, sapphic women.
The majority of art and literature in our culture gladly erases and flanderizes the queer experience to avoid challenging the preconceptions of their cishet audience and maximize profits. Yet the people condemning us in public consume our bodies in private. Lesbians and transgender women are only allowed to exist for the purposes of the male gaze. Our books are banned, our flags are taken down, and our memorials are defaced; there is only one form of "palatable" representation we are allowed, the top two categories on PornHub.
Oppression shares much in common with abuse. Both rely on isolating and silencing the victim while controlling a narrative. Therefore, to create art and literature that humanizes and empowers sapphic women is resistance. Stories centering sapphic women tell the truths of our experiences and tear away at the oppressors' mask of "family values." Our enemies are aware of this. If queer content was not important, if it did not undermine the power structures of our society, then the fascists would not dedicate so much time to restricting and destroying it.
In the face of those who would eradicate our culture and efface our struggle, we must each respond to the best of our ability. There is nothing we can do that will placate the enemy except stop existing. All of us are nonconsensual combatants in a war we did not make and it will not end until the cost of harming us is too great.
I am not a soldier and the pen is the only weapon I know. That is fine. Authoritarians fear the pen and I will remind them why.
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
- Charles Darwin
Conscious beings capable of suffering and who desire to live, whether they are human, non-human animals, silicon-based, or aliens, have an inherent worth and dignity that should not be abridged without due cause. Harm reduction and consideration of their autonomy is an ethical imperative. Corollaries of this include bodily, psychological, and social autonomy, environmental stewardship, and veganism.
Our flesh and minds are ours to warp and mold as we move towards a transhumanist future. However, this must come with a rejection of eugenics and ableism. Choosing what embreyos grow into humans by filtering out 'undesirable' traits or directly modifying human genetic material sets a dangerous precedent that could be used to eliminate queer, neurodivergent, and disabled people and must be rigorously controlled by stakeholders and bioethicists. Surgeries on infants such as circumcision and the assignment of sex to intersex babies violates their autonomy as these beings cannot consent. Denying abortion rights, the right to transition, the right to love, and the right to death with dignity is denying ownership of one's own body.
In a similar vein, criminalization of drugs is not just a policy used to recreate slavery in the United States and as an excuse to police the globe, it is a denial of control over one's own consciousness. Ending the war on drugs not only undercuts the USA's imperialist agenda and prevents the breakup of thousands of families across the country, it also allows for the management of drug abuse as a public health problem. The damage that addiction does at the family, community, and global scale is undeniable and imprisoning people with an addiction or any other mental health issue fundamentally does not help them or anyone else except for the capitalists profitting from prison labor.
Also it's bullshit that we have a cyberpunk dystopia and we didn't even get to biomod animal parts onto ourselves!
Freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and privacy are fundamental rights. Mass surveillance attempts to undermine all of these. We were not meant to cower, hiding our thoughts on loose leaf paper under our mattresses like Winston in 1984. It is intentional Newspeak that anyone who does not submit to the Christian nationalist surveillance state is labeled an enemy of state.
We are not separate from the environment and other living things; we are the universe conscious of itself. Therefore, to harm the environment is to harm ourselves. The destruction of the environment in the pursuit of infinite growth and shareholder profit is a tragedy for every living being, including us. We must strive to preserve nature as much as possible, this is not antithetical but critical to maximizing the wellbeing of humans.
Animals experience suffering and desire to live. However, under capital and our systems of exploitation, animals are treated as nothing but unfeeling meat shoved into cages and literally factory-farmed. Even if not slaughtered, these animals cannot give informed consent. In accordance with their inherent worth and dignity, the ethical decision is to participate in the consumption of animal products as little as feasible. For someone in a developed country without a limiting medical condition, this takes the form of veganism.
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
- Murray Bookchin
Capitalism, the State, Patriarchy, White Supremacy, and other systems of oppression are interwoven and interlocking in such a way that it is impossible to completely deconstruct one while leaving the others intact. All forms of authority and hierarchy must be challenged and the burden of proof of legitimacy lies with the authority. Only by addressing all human-made inequities and inequalities in our world can we achieve true freedom.
Rights are not given. They are taken back.
Borders are the product of the modern nation-state and their dissolution is our birthright. No one owns the Earth, the ocean, or the sky. They are our universal human heritage. Borders perpetuate human trafficking, poverty in developing parts of the world, serve as flashpoints in conflict (especially those drawn by colonial powers), and divide us from people who, just like us, simply wish to work, play, and love our friends and families.